jdoss

I was thinking the same thing. We do need more. I set up a Meshtastic node at the house and joined https://chicagolandmesh.org/ which has been a fantastic community for beginners in mesh based comms.

I instantly thought of Reticulum too. I got into LoRa based stuff last weekend and the thought of sending messages super slowly to random people around the Chicago area has me excited again about the possiblities of a distrubuted network that nobody truely owns. I bet LoRa based projects are going to have tons of problems at scale but right now it's pretty fun.

I use defined.net (managed Nebula) for my homelab and side project overlay networks, and it works great. They have a very generous free tier and I automate enrollment with a set of systemd units that I wrote. Configuration is very easy and the Nebula android app does what I need so I can access everything over my phone. A few friends use wg-easy to manage their wireguard setups, and they sing its praise.

I still use wireguard for simple point to point tunnels into my datacenter rack but anything important I use Nebula.

https://github.com/quickvm/defined-systemd-units

I got hit by the Minio admin change in the console when I upgraded my installation recently, and I found https://github.com/huncrys/minio-console which adds it all back in. It works as expected so far.

I find this kind of rug pull behavior so hostile I will be looking to replace Minio as soon as possible in my homelab. To be clear, I would pay for a license if the prices weren't impossible to afford as an invidual who uses Minio for non-business reasons.

Jason Donenfeld is listed as a Technical Advisor on https://tailscale.com/company. Most companies pay their advisors something, so I assume something monetary is going on here for him.

I just learned about ControlD today and It seems their $2/mo per endpoint is pretty pricey. Do you just set it on your home router and that's it? I use my NextDNS with many different profiles and many unique devices. Are the ControlD features that much better?

Edit: I totally missed they have a Personal tab at the top that has different pricing. It is still more expensive for their full control plan.

This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks.

https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

Hah, my gist from 2022 is on this post as a "broken guide". I'd disagree in saying it is broken. It works just fine and I flat out say at the top to not use it if you are worried about a cold boot attack on your hardware.

Woah! Thanks for pointing this feature out. This will be super handy to skip large amounts of output.

I have a rack in a datacenter with mostly 5 year old Supermicro servers. We bought them all off of Ebay for no more than $400 each. They work great and we have more compute and bandwidth for our workloads for less than $1000 a month. If we used one of the could providers it would be many thousands of dollars per month. I understand not everyone has the skills to run their own rack but the value of doing so is totally worth it.

The big question I have is how well does it work on Linux. I'd assume pretty well considering all of their work on making gaming on Linux a great experience, but if I stream on Discord my FPS tanks hard with an NVIDIA card and X11. I look forward to seeing how well does in comparison.

This looks exactly what I have been looking for to put outside of my home office to keep my family from interrupting me during work meetings. Thanks for sharing it!

I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was always third or forth on my searches.

This python code looks fantastic. Worked right out of the gate. Thanks!

Also I was not aware of the Aranet Radiation sensor. There goes some of my fun budget towards picking one of these up.

Gentoo Linux will always have a special place in my heart. I learned so much about Linux doing Stage 1 installs back in 2002. I also learned patience with the long compile times and I heated my apartment during the winter. Pentium 4s kicked off a lot of heat. :)

Leaving the should uutils be used over coreutils debate aside, this was a fun read for me and the urge to install Gentoo one one of my many old Thinkpads is flaring up hard.

I agree with this post so hard. Email is the foundation for people's life online. In fact I am working on building a better self hosted mail platform in my free time because I believe in having the freedom to move your email to wherever you choose.

Running your own mail server has a bad stigma around it that doesn't have to be true. I understand it is not a task for everyone, but it doesn't have to this don't bother just use Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail etc etc mentality. I have been running my own since 2002 and I would never consider doing anything else for such an important part of my life.

The big mail providers have built a walled garden to hold your email communications hostage and they want you to believe that you can't send email without them. There are many of us that know that is bullshit and it is time to move the needle back. I am excited to read Run Your Own Mail Server by Michael W Lucas when it comes out in Aug.

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms

I am pretty bummed that they are discontinuing it and not open sourcing the hardware. I use mine at my desk every day to control my desktop Spotify and it is pretty nice having hardware controls for my music.

Shame on Spotify.

I have been using Ollama to run the Llama3 model and I chat with it via Obsidian using https://github.com/logancyang/obsidian-copilot and I hook VSCode into it with https://github.com/ex3ndr/llama-coder

Having the chats in Obsidian lets me save them to reference them later in my notes. When I first started using it in VSCode when programming in Python it felt like a lot of noise at first. It kept generating a lot of useless recommendations, but recently it has been super helpful.

I think my only gripe is I sometimes forget to turn off my ollama systemd unit and I get some noticeable video lag when playing games on my workstation. I think for my next video card upgrade, I am going to build a new home server that can fit my current NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti and use that as a dedicated server for running ollama.

I was thinking about how fun it would be to add this my Python CLI [0] I made for launching Fedora CoreOS locally with QEMU for testing ignition, but with a flag that is turned off by default. Using the burn effect in TTE when launching a VM with my CLI would be so cool.

This instantly reminded me about Ansible and how it annoyed me that ANSIBLE_NOCOWS had to be enabled to disable the default output of Ansible with cowsay [1].

[0]: https://github.com/quickvm/bupy

[1]: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/10530

I am aware of the raw module. The stuff I was doing with Ansible and Fedora CoreOS required more than just that module.

I just started using Pyinfra to wrangle a bunch of servers and it is a breath of fresh air compared to Ansible. I moved all of my server OS installs to Fedora CoreOS which doesn't ship with Python in the OS and since Pyinfra doesn't need Python on the host node I can kick off tasks in bulk to do server things. It is great. I cannot wait to see where the Pyinfra project goes.

On a side note, one of the most hacky things I came up with to get Ansible working on Fedora CoreOS was to bind mount a container rootfs that had python 3 and then symlink it into the right spots. You can of course add Python in with rpm-ostree if you want but I wanted to avoid layering packages at the time. I wasn't proud of it. But it worked.

https://github.com/forem/selfhost/blob/main/playbooks/templa...

The reaction to Anduril sponsoring Nix is very similar to some people's reaction at Kubecon 2018 where the U.S. Air Force gave a talk about how they are using k8s to deploy software on F-16s.

https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...

The major problem is the lack of individual domain knowledge on the underlying server techs that run simple to complex workloads. We have abstracted away a lot of that with APIs and YAMLs so developers don't need to know the inner-workings of Linux, Networking, and Storage. This is a huge negative when things go wrong and there are hundreds of tools that we have access to which makes things insanely complicated if not used correctly.

A lot of developers will throw compute resources at problems rather than solving within their code. I get it, that is the faster route in almost every case. They won't get hired or promoted if they don't use the current "new hottness" in our industry. This leads to insane cloud spend and super complex deployment setups.

Businesses and VC have been trying to obsolete the sysadmin role on the team for over 15 years now. They shove this responsibility onto developers and expect them to get paid to effectively two jobs for the price of one. We are simply overloaded with work and not having to deal with getting your code into production is something that some developers don't want to own and want an easy button to press to do this job. This is what is driving the want for a "Platform Experience". All of us in the tech community are paying the price with more work responsibilities and higher expectations from the C suite to deliver features faster.

I am all for making Ops more easier for everyone on the engineering team to consume but, not at the complexity price we are currently paying.

Check out Vector for shipping logs from Docker. It might work out for you https://vector.dev/docs/reference/configuration/sources/dock...

I use Podman for all of my container stuff and there are issues with how Podman produces JSON logs

https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/6807 https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/16317

which needs to get fixed before I can use it for my workloads.

I recently setup Victoria Metrics + https://github.com/prometheus/snmp_exporter + Grafana to get start tracking bandwidth on my top of rack switches in my Datacenter rack which has been a pretty awesome setup. The way you can auto generate a config for your SNMP MIBs with SNMP Exporter was unexpectedly not a terrible experience.

My next task is to get centralized logging going with Victoria Logs + Vector, I'll have to check this out once I get everything setup. I believe I can use LogQL with Victoria Logs but I haven't tried it out yet. https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/logsql/

I second NextDNS. You can have different profiles on your account so I have one just for the kids devices that is pretty locked down and one for me that is less restrictive for us adults in the family. I used to run a PiHole a few years back, but having NextDNS on the go is very very nice.

I think my only gripe is it blocks a lot of email unsubscribe links so I have to allow list them to unsubscribe and some wifi hot spots with captive portals (like when flying) breaks third party DNS providers, so I have to turn it off to connect.

This has been posted a few times already, but I cannot tell you how life changing Paperless NGX is for organizing PDFs. As someone who wrangles all of the insurance and bills for my house, this open source software is so damn good.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I maintain Bash script to quickly set it up locally on Linux with Podman. Give it a spin if you want to kick the tires.

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

Thanks for posting this! I did a lot of API work in Python last fall and I was just using curl because, as far as I could tell, none of the other clients (Postman, hoppskotch, insomnia etc) were fully offline.

Bruno looks fantastic and it is only $9 USD for a preorder license right now. That is a pretty good deal to support this work.

As someone who used Apache 1.3.x through 2.x heavily from 2000 to 2015, I respectfully disagree with this statement. Nginx and Traefik are easier to configure, have better communities and in most cases perform better.

Traefik Opensource is my go to for almost all of my use cases theses days and I have never stopped and said hmmm I wonder if Apache would do better here. It is that good.

You came across antagonistic, but fair enough, thanks for the apology.

Let me put it this way. I understand that you can block YouTube ads and have the techicnal means to block them at the DNS level. I also understand I can run different frontends for YouTube, but it is flat out easier and faster for me personally to not do that and to pay $22.99 a month for my entire family to enjoy ad free content. Time is money.

Also, I play a decent amount of video games and I send money monthly to content creators on said games I play. If something brings value to my life or makes things easier, I will pay for it. Just because I pay for something you do not like doesn't mean I don't support content creators via other means.